Most schools maintain attendance records to track whether students attend school. It is known in the art to process these attendance records to generate automated alerts that are broadcast to the guardians for absent students. However, to the inventors' knowledge, such systems often result in the school district's telephone lines being inundated with responsive telephone calls from guardians shortly after the alerts are broadcast. Typically, such inundation occurs shortly after the broadcasts regarding student absences are sent out and continues for an hour or more thereafter. During this time, school personnel are bombarded with telephone calls from guardians to explain why their respective children were absent, which pulls those personnel away from their other work tasks. Given the consistent and intermittent patterns of these calls from guardians, school personnel are rendered highly unproductive during this time. Furthermore, given some people's talkative natures, it is not uncommon for these telephone calls from guardians regarding their child's absence to branch out into other topics which further hinders the productivity of the school personnel.
In an effort to provide a solution to these problems, the inventors disclose methods and systems for intelligently notifying first parties via automated telephone calls regarding an absence by second parties at an event with minimal burden on a third party who manages attendance issues for the event. Preferably, the event is a school session, the second parties are students who are supposed to attend the school session, the first parties are guardians for the students, and the third party is a school employee who handles attendance issues.
In accordance with a first exemplary embodiment, the inventors disclose a method comprising: (1) initiating a communication session with a communications device associated with a first party via an automated telephone call, (2) detecting whether the communication session is an in person communication with a user of the communications device or an in absentia communication session with the communications device, (3) in response to detecting that the communication session is an in person communication session, (a) sending a first automated notification to the user via the automated telephone call, the first automated notification configured to provide a notification regarding a non-attendance by a second party at an event, wherein the first automated notification is further configured to be interactive to permit the user to respond to the notification, (b) receiving the user's response to the first automated notification during the automated telephone call, (c) storing the received response, and (d) providing a third party with access to the stored response, and (4) in response to detecting that the communication session is an in absentia communication session, sending a second automated notification to a messaging service associated with the communications device via the automated telephone call, the second automated notification configured to provide a notification regarding the non-attendance by the second party at the event and also including contact information associated with a third party, and wherein the initiating, detecting, first automated notification sending, receiving, storing, providing and second automated notification sending steps are performed by a processor.
In accordance with a second exemplary embodiment, the inventors disclose a system comprising a processor configured to (1) initiate a communication session with a communications device associated with the first party via an automated telephone call, (2) detect whether the communication session is an in person communication with a user of the communications device or an in absentia communication session with the communications device, (3) in response to detecting that the communication session is an in person communication session, (a) send a first automated notification to the user via the automated telephone call, the first automated notification configured to provide a notification regarding a non-attendance by a second party at an event, wherein the first automated notification is further configured to be interactive to permit the user to respond to the notification, (b) receive the user's response to the first automated notification during the automated telephone call, (c) store the received response, and (d) provide a third party with access to the stored response, and (4) in response to detecting that the communication session is an in absentia communication session, send a second automated notification to a messaging service associated with the communications device via the automated telephone call, the second automated notification configured to provide a notification regarding the non-attendance by the second party at the event and also including contact information associated with a third party.
Through such exemplary methods and systems, the burdens placed on third parties can be greatly decreased because the methods and systems guide first parties into responding to the notifications without directly interacting with the third party. In doing so, third parties are freed to perform other tasks and be more productive.
These and other features and advantages of the present invention will be apparent to those having ordinary skill in the art upon a review of the disclosure herein.